It's a bird. It's a plane. Well, actually, it's both. It's called an ornithopter, and it can fly – kind of. James DeLaurier, an aeronautical engineer and professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, spent the past 30 years working on a craft that would take to the sky not through forward thrust and airfoil-shaped wings but by flapping like a bird. Inspired by the beauty of animal flight (just like Leonardo da Vinci, who made sketches for an ornithopter), DeLaurier's machine uses a dedicated gas motor to move its wings up and down once a second while a jet engine provides boost for takeoff. In July, the plane got airborne for 14 seconds, covering a quarter mile with all the grace of a drunken bat. DeLaurier may seem a bit cuckoo, but he has perseverance. "Once, we were going down the runway, the engine was speeding up, and the wings stopped flapping," he says. "One of the drivechains was lying on the airstrip like a dead garter snake." Now that it's made such an impressive flight, the ornithopter is grounded, penguinlike, on display at the Toronto Aerospace Museum.
– James Lee
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